Thanks Boomer,
So, the sights on the rifle aren't particularly high quality?
The seller suggested they were very high quality "Leyman sights".
tia,
CM
The issue is not one of quality, rather it is one of practicality. I'm not suggesting that the iron sights on your rifle lack quality, rather they are not the style of sight I prefer. An open sight requires you to attempt to manage 3 points of focus, the front sight must line up with the rear sight and the sights together must then be put on the target. This is difficult and time consuming because the human eye can only focus on an object at a single focal distance at one time. The temptation is to continually shift your focus from one point to another; rear sight, front sight, target, thus the open sight is neither fast or precise.
This focus problem can be visualized as follows: Hold the forefinger of your right hand say 8"-10" from your dominant eye and concentrate on it until you can see the fingerprint on that finger. That finger is now in sharp focus. Now hold up the forefinger of your other hand at full arms length so that both fingers are within the field of view of your eye. You will see that the farther finger is somewhat out of focus unless you adjust your focus to the forward finger at which time the close finger looses focus. Now hold up both fingers against an object on the wall across the room and you will see that the object across the room can only be in focus when both fingers are out of focus, the object across the room is out of focus and the rear finger is out of focus if the front finger is in focus, and the object across the room and the front finger are out of focus if the rear finger is in focus.
A peep sight or ghost ring rear sight allows the shooter to ignore the rear sight provided the front sight is somewhere inside the aperture. Our shooter then places the front sight on the target, then pulls his focus back to the front sight and concentrates on the front sight until the shot breaks. Very good shooting can be done with an aperture rear sight, almost as good as with a scope provided the target is large enough at the range that it is engaged.
The primary advantage of the scope sight is not magnification. If it were, then a 20X scope would always be superior to a 2X scope, and clearly this is not the case. The advantage of the scope is that the aiming point, the reticle, and the target appear on the same focal plane and are both in sharp focus when the scope is properly adjusted.